PiVoyager is a UPS for the Raspberry Pi With a Real-Time Calendar Clock

The Raspberry Pi is a powerful SBC (Single Board Computer), and aside from being used for everyday computing stuff, the Raspberry Pi can be embedded as the brain of various projects. Using the Raspberry Pi for standalone projects do create some concerns about power. How do I power the Pi? Should I get a power bank? Or maybe I need a longer wired connector.

PiVoyager: the smart UPS for the Raspberry Pi.

If powering your Raspberry Pi based project has always being a concern to you, then you don’t have to worry about it again with the introduction of the PiVoyager. The PiVoyager is an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) for the Raspberry Pi specially designed to work with standard Li-Ion or LiPo batteries.

It is shaped in the form a Pi Zero HaT making it fully compatible with PiZero form factor, but nevertheless, it will still work with any Raspberry-PI having the conventional 40-pin header found in the Pi 2,3, B+, and 4.

The PiVoyager was made by Omzlo, the team behind the NoCAN IoT Platform. The UPS Hat goes a step above standard UPS device; it comes with a programmable watchdog, wake-up and a real-time calendar clock that can be used with the Raspberry

The PiVoyager is not the only UPS HaT designed for the Raspberry Pi. PiJuice Zero is a similar UPS device with a slightly hefty price, LiFePO4wered/Pi+ is another one that relies on LiFeP04 (Lithium Iron Phosphate) battery which is said to be safer and longer-lasting albeit at the cost of lower capacity, and some others as well.

The PiVoyager can power the Pi and charge a Li-Ion/LiPo battery simultaneously. When the HaT is plugged to a USB power course, it charges and powers the Pi. It supports a charge current of 1A (default) or 0.5A for the battery. With the USB power removed, it can provide up to 2.1A max at 5V to the Raspberry Pi automatically without switching the Pi off.

The RTC (Real-Time Calendar) on the PiVoyager can store the current date and time. Some of the possibilities with the PiVoyager are:

Monitor power status and battery voltage.

Force the Raspberry Pi to shut down after a specified delay entirely.

Act as a watchdog, powering down the Raspberry Pi if it becomes inactive.

Power up the Raspberry Pi at a specific date/time (alarm).

Power up the Raspberry Pi after a certain delay.

Update the firmware through I2C thanks to a built-in bootloader.

A battery protection circuity isn’t built into the PiVoyager, so if you mistakenly misconnect the terminals of your battery to the HaT, things could go wrong. There is battery connector, and an alternative 2.54mm 2-pin header is also provided for battery connection.

The PiVoyager is available for purchase on Tindie for $27.95 without VAT and shipping. With VAT, the price could go up to $34.66. The PiVoyager is targeted at batteries with a nominal voltage of 3.7V, a charging voltage of 4.2V and supporting a charge current of 1000mA

More information about the product is available on the product page as well. Also, the hardware design is open-source and available at GitHub, and the software firmware is available here.

A free wanderer who is highly interested in technology, especially those concerned with saving and solving human problems. He could be nerdy sometimes, in that state he is digesting topics related to deep learning, machine learning, natural language processing, internet of things, smart cities, embedded systems, mobile robots, precision agriculture, and lastly machine vision.

You should always use overvoltage/undervoltage protection on each cell itself and not rely on the charging circuits to do that.
Other than bare 18650 cells, most cells feature that kind of protection anyway.

Vote Up0Vote Down Reply

9 months ago

Guest

dgp

>I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near this when the device breaks due to a voltage spike or something.

Over-discharge will result in the cell puffing up not it exploding. If your input power supply has very bad regulation there isn’t much any charger can do for you. Even with input protection if the voltage spikes are big enough all bets are off.

Vote Up0Vote Down Reply

9 months ago

Guest

Alex

Does it have brownout detection/protection?

Vote Up0Vote Down Reply

9 months ago

Guest

dgp

>It doesn’t have RTC, but other than that, it works just like the board above.

Not saying this thing is any good but what you linked isn’t really “just like the board above”. They both have a charger and step up the output voltage but this pivoyager thing should allow for the pi to be totally powered off and woken up via it’s RTC and so forth.

FYI the common charger/stepup modules on ebay aren’t really good for stuff like this as the step up is connected to the battery directly so they generally don’t work very well when you have a source to charge from and a load connected. The MCP73871 used in this thing has automatic power path switching so the battery is disconnected from the output when it’s charging and the input voltage is fed through to the load without going through the chargers constant current/constant voltage control.

Embedded Systems Jobs

Facebook is seeking a Software Engineer to design, develop and implement hardware-near software for accelerators and other components used in our infrastructure. This person will be an integral member of the team, responsible for embedded software de

We are a smart team of doers that work passionately to apply cutting-edge advances in and to solve real-world challenges that will transform our customers experiences in ways we cant even imagine yet. As a Firmware Engineer, you will be working with

Echo Frames is Amazon's first prescription-ready smart glasses. In this role, you will be working on the current and future roadmap for Echo Frames. The team is focused on bringing technology and design into a form that is familiar to millions of gla

Echo Frames is Amazon's first prescription-ready smart glasses. In this role, you will be working on the current and future roadmap for Echo Frames. The team is focused on bringing technology and design into a form that is familiar to millions of gla

RT-Thread was born in 2006, it is an open-source, neutral, and community-based real-time operating system. As an open-source project, RT-Thread has received strong support and contributions from the community developers and many chips and original eq